Although he sings about characters named Leather McWhip and proclaims his tendency towards radical perversion, Stephen Malkmus is a man to be taken seriously. With his former band Pavement he broke new ground – pun intended. One can’t speak of the history of indie rock without name-dropping the man who used to go by his initials, SM.
Today, the new father and Portland resident still refuses, in his own way, to settle down. “This is not a time for softness”, he says in between attending to his baby daughter’s sniffle.
On his brand new album, “Face the Truth”, Stephen Malkmus has fashioned another intelligent, challenging and fun-as-hell indie rock tour de force. We had the pleasure of sitting down with him to chat about his new album, his creative process, and the state of music today.
When writing a new album, do you think like, ”Man, I’ve got to come up with all these insanely clever lyrics again’? Do you ever feel like you need to outdo yourself?
I think it’s pretty natural, some of it at least. You can’t really force that stuff or it ends up sounding stupid. I just try to keep things up to the standards I can bear. Not everything on there is a genius line of course, but I try to get some zingers in there. Sometimes ideas pop into my head when I’m humming one of my tunes. Lately, I like to look at the backs of albums of soundtracks of movies. The titles of the songs on them are often quite evocative because they use them to explain these scenarios in movies and I twist them around. They turn out pretty funny.
Now that you mention it, a lot of your songs seem to also have a cinematic quality to them, musically. If you were a filmmaker, who would you be?
Good question. Maybe I would be Erich von Stroheim, a weird, perverted silent film director from the 1920s. I think he was German but he made his mark in Hollywood and England making silent movies. He did a really creepy film called, ‘Greed’. He has perverted characters in there, and for the time he was pretty radical. I guess I’m not that radical.
What happened to the Jicks, your former backing band? Unlike your first two post-Pavement records, is “Face the Truth” Jicks-free?
They’re around on the recordings here or there, specifically the drummer. He played a lot on it. I recorded it at my house and monopolized the precedings in a way that I haven’t lately. That’s why I put my own name on it. The Jicks jam on three of the songs. We’re still going to play live and continue the next time to be more like a Crazy Horse thing.
Why didn’t you just go it alone entirely then?
I wanted to have some other human element than me on there because it just gets super extra-masturbatory if you’re on the drums too. It just gets to be even more of an ego trip than this already is. (laughs) If it sounds that way, it makes me feel guilty. It was like that in Pavement times too. I try really hard to make it sound like a band. I overcompensate by making the voice sound disembodied with effects. It’s kind of a weird personality trait.
Each new album you make reaffirms your status as a rad guitar player.
There are two or three shredding guitar moments, but I tried to keep the songs pretty short. I could go on much longer. I could have done 5 to 8 minutes. If I really thought that’s what people wanted, and I am considerative of what people want…if that was the rage I’d be happy to join. It’s not though, so I just put a few in there. We try to make it entertaining, but not to over-attack people’s time.
Were there any particular effects you found yourself using a lot of on “Face the Truth”?
I was doing a lot of creative punching-in, where I’d be playing a guitar part and midway press the record button with my toe. Then I put together these cut-together things. I hadn’t really done that before. I also distorted vocals, more than just overdriving them.
Would you be upset if mp3 files of your new album were found swimming around on a file sharing service? Or, is that, in a way, damn good marketing?
I can’t really be bothered too much by that. I’ve had a pretty good run in the music industry so I’m not going to bite the hand of the consumer. Everyone is kind of guilty of file sharing one way or another.
A couple years back, there was a class action lawsuit in New York against Clear Channel. Consumers were complaining about high ticket prices resulting from the Clear Channel monopoly. Have the changes taking place in the concert industry affected your band?
It doesn’t affect me in terms of the airwaves, because I wasn’t going to be on their airwaves anyways. It is really strange with club ownership though, because they own really small clubs as well. You’re in a really small club that looks like a local bar and it turns out that Clear Channel owns it. In university towns, there will be some old club and you’ll find out House of Blues owns it or Clear Channel owns it. The ticket prices are sort of inevitably getting higher. We’re still playing to be a soundtrack for people drinking beer half of the time. Alcohol consumption is really what keeps the clubs going, for better or worse.
On your first solo album, you were pictured on the cover wading in the ocean like some Dorian Gray-ish indie god. You’re 38 now, but I get the feeling that you still feel a bit like that teenager who’s rocking out with his first band in his parent’s basement. Is your profession the key to eternal youth?
You certainly do become more careful in some ways. I think I’m a little immature with the music and that’s a good thing. I’m sort of like Jeff Bridges in that movie by the Coen brothers.
You’re ‘the Dude’?
Kind of, like I’m not growing up. It’s fun to try to kick ass even if you fail. The predictable thing for me would have been to go singer/songwriter like most adults, but it just wasn’t in my cards yet. And, they get soft. This is not a time for softness, my friend. Plus, in our music scene here, softness is in – bands like the Shins or Arcade Fire or Death Cab for Cutie, they’re very twee and good and nice, but they’re not very rebellious.
What do you think of the explosion of new bands on the scene? They all seem very marketed.
It’s going to keep coming. Things are getting very specialized and aimed; finely tuned to succeed. There are still things that connect in a deep way in the mainstream. I see things I like sometimes, like Queens of the Stone Age, for example.
While a lot of these new bands will likely have a short shelf-life, your music, both with Pavement and solo, has a timeless quality to it.
It’s definitely not trying to keep up with what’s going on in the Lower East Side bars in New York city, but I think that’s a good thing for someone my age and it’s a good thing for most good art. To me, it’s important that it’s not ‘trying’ to be relevant. Sometimes you can get caught up in that, but that stuff won’t matter so much in the future.